Aliens: Colonial Marines - Is it what the second movie made you want to experience?
Some of what this game should have been:
ALIENS the movie, with a different story so you could experience the terror and the claustrophobia other USMC marines surely felt. Aliens hiding in ducts or blending in with hive-walls just like in the movie, waiting for the perfect moment to slither or lunge into action for a creepy-jeepy moment or a jumpscare. Moments where you're with your crew feeling safe even though truly you're just a pile of fish in a barrel waiting to die, other moments where you're off on your own holding your breath, trying to sneak through and not die, or at times rushing in hopes that you make it. Times where you have comms with teammates so you get help OR better yet, interesting story bits that move it all along, but long stretches where you don't have the constant annoying banter so the vulnerability of loneliness sets in. Scripted in-game events where teammates are plucked out from around you just like you helplessly watched in the movies where you may or may not be able to react fast enough to save them. Moments where aliens uncoil themselves from the hive walls like the opening of venus fly traps. Similarly points where you come across dead marines or marines in need of help who were cut off, marines that have gone mad from the horror they have experienced, and marines in the hive needing release. Level design that is mostly cramped, rarely open so every turn you are expecting aliens, BUT not aliens in all shadowy corners so sometimes it's the expectation not met that unsettles you the most. WAY less ammo, way more feeling of desperation, a much more frightening sense anytime you're outside the colony and exposed to the awful environment. I sort of expected something like Alien: Isolation but BETTER in every way, and with aliens you could kill. Maybe 'open sandbox' seeing as you're on a planet in a colony with very few options of where to go. Intense, horrifying realism...
So what did we get from SEGA?
The AI was TRASH.
Sometimes the aliens would be rushing and then stop only a few meters away in the crouch and then wait. It was as if the game prohibited more than a certain number of aliens from attacking at once. They would stay there waiting to be killed and they wouldn't retaliate.
Other times they would 'hide' behind a crate or desk as if waiting for scripting that says "GO!" because you haven't entered a room far enough... but you can see their tail swaying above them... and their shadow on the wall. Or sometimes they'd have already attacked, and cease attacking and 'hide' in the same fashion. It made zero sense.
Also their scripted or permitted "travel paths" were so limited and pathetic that they would only come from the same directions, ruining any potential for suspense or surprise.
Also, often you could hear sounds through walls that should have been thick enough that you can't hear anything, perhaps bass at best. I also noticed before many, many sealed doors opened the same "gunfire, aliens screaming" soundclip played... and it was the same file again and again. Way to break immersion entirely. It was so dumb and OFTEN UNNECESSARY because on the other side there was no fighting going on nor any indication a fight had just been happening.
As for the team AI, sometimes they were shooting everything, sometimes nothing, not even in front of them. So you couldn't rely on them whatsoever. It's so terrible playing a game where the AI kills everything before you even see them, like aimbot snipers. But it's equally terrible playing with AI teammates that may as well not be there, as they just get in the way and give you a false sense of security. Dreadful.
Most of the game you have these teammates with you, but why?
The writing for the story was so horrible, so so horrible. As most pathetic FPS campaigns anymore there's always that "guy on the comms" telling you what to do. They know if they put someone with you to "guide you" they're terrible to have around, but they also treat the player like a moron and can't write a level layout and queues in an interesting way that's not so on-the-nose it is annoying, so they have that person telling you what to do the entire time.
They honestly tried to use the ALIENS license to make a fast buck on the Call of Duty thing that was all the rage back then. That's what it felt like, "Call of Duty meets Aliens," done poorly. Why the huge emphasis on Weyland Yutani security forces? Nobody wanted that. Where did the hundreds and hundreds of WY soldiers come from? The Marine ship was roughly the same size of the Sulaco... the Sulaco carried about 20 crew. Somehow yours has a battalion of Marines? You hear "platoons are out there!" but you NEVER get a sense of the scale of your assasult expeditionary unit - what a waste then. You never see any indication in your ship that it's even possible there's that many. Nor do you see them all together in parade assembly or anything. And when you see the WY ship in the DLC it's also around the same size.. but held hundreds and hundreds of disposable security guys PLUS hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand civillians tricked into coming along to be the hosts of a xenomorph infestation (I killed about that many aliens)? Just made no sense.
I should mention I installed the TemplarGFX 'total overhaul' mod over the game. Apparently only some maps were remastered with it to have better lighting and that showed. Sometimes it was evident, other times evidently not on. Also the AI was supposed to be drastically improved. I don't for a second believe the AI was ruined by the mod, I think it was always bad - I know this because every review of this game at launch said the AI was brokenly terrible, described exactly like my experience was, and it was never fixed, and the people I met through STEAM to play with said their experiences were the same.
The other huge gripe was the map design. HUGE, HUGE open areas again and again so aliens had no choice but to dash across big distances where they were easy to kill. How did the devs try to solve this? Make your aliens capable of jumping 50 meters through the air, I kid you not. Never do you see aliens jump this far in any movie, and physics and xenomorph biology tell you it's not possible, but there it was. It was so sickening.
What the heck was with the Unreal engine? It looked TERRIBLE. Honestly while playing the game I couldn't help but think, "Didn't DOOM 3 look WAY better than this for lighting and ambience???? Why not use that?!" so I went back and looked at DOOM 3 and maybe it looked better... but honestly something could have been better. The game was too bright, and the environs were too clean.
As well the field of view was so confined. Now I didn't want a weird skewed perspective like I'm playing QUAKE ARENA at 270 degrees, just bizarre... but this felt like I was looking through a square box, like an ancient CRT monitor even though I was on a gorgeous widescreen. Just odd. The only time this was acceptable was one you were using the Smartguns, and that's because you use the smartgun by looking through an eyepiece. This was good. They also captured the Pulserifle quite well, but the devs can't get the gunfire sound right - it just plays the typical "burst" .wav from the movie again and again, even if you tap and shoot a single bullet. That's not how guns go bang-bang... They should have put some effort into figuring out how to make it work. Oh, and just because the grenade launcher is underslung doesn't mean shooting from the hip while looking over a thigh-high wall should make the 20-mike-mike blow up in your own freakin' face and kill you... Thaaaankssss....
The DLC attempt to save Hicks was so bad too. I felt bad for Michael Biehn. Don't know where he's gone - maybe he got tired of all the child-pedophelia in hollywood and wanted to cut ties - but he sounded very tired (not because he's aged) as if he has been drinking a LOT. I hope that's not the case, but I know hollywood chews actors up and spits them out. The only ones who make it are the ones who LOVE the evil going on behind the scenes. Anyway, ALIEN3 did Biehn and Hicks wrong for sure, but it happened, and when emergency pods crash land on planets, people die, and as jarring as it was it was raw, gritty, and real. I hated it, but I accepted it. Piss-poor writing can't undo that. This was as insulting as the writers thinking they could fondle fanboys to make them goo-goo for the game. Not at all cool. Aside from that I "liked" having Hicks back, but anyone who thought it was done well is too blinded by ALIENS-fanaticism.
I DID like when the queen got loose and killed the scientists against the glass as you walked by. Other than that, not much else. Well the smartguns were awesome too. It was satisfying using controlled bursts and making them last far longer than the game anticipated.
Oh yeah, the loader battle was so bad. I didn't know whether I was hurting that alien or not. I really didn't appreciate the many different classes of aliens either. The acid aliens were so dumb. Their purpose was to make up for levels designed to be far too open than necessary. That's it. An alien spitting ten feet just like in the movies? Cool. Hawking acid-loogies ten decameters, NO!
I can't help but wonder if some upper management guy gave the go-ahead for his 13 year old son and some friends to write this, or give far too much artistic input. lol, you'd have to hear it in my recorded review after I finished the game but my impression hits the nail on the head: "GUH, ALIENS, OH MAN, I JUST WANT MORE ALIENS!!!"
that's here: https://youtu.be/OrINvWCcKuw?t=6857
We're supposed to suspend any critical thinking and believe somehow Hicks's distress call was answered by marines, but first Burke had snuck off and called, and WY came and built up infrastructure and exploratory complex that would have taken 17 MONTHS, if not years... but somehow it took less than 17 weeks?! And so much of Hadley's Hope still exists EVEN THOUGH YOU NUKED THE REACTOR?!?! YOU UNDID EVERY AWESOME MOMENT IN THE ALIENS MOVIE!!! DON'T CRAP IN MY MOUTH AND TELL ME IT'S CHOCOLATE MOUSSE!!!!
And that end fight against the queen... what the heck. Fine, you can't shoot her to death, I get it. But the queen battle should have been drawn out over several missions where once or twice you have to cleverly evade before you finally just push her out a bay door.
So much squandered opportunity here. This was just a goofy piece of crap. I honestly can't believe how poorly this license was handled. How do you treat it with such contempt? It's like they thought, "Pff, fanboys will be all over themselves to get this, who cares how crap it is, hurry up, get it out, I've got a new Porsche ordered and a weekend with $10,000-a-night escorts booked! They'll forget how bad this was and buy the next one in a few years."
So I tried BUGHUNT out to see if that was a better experience. It was mildly fun because I was with other guys (and we had this great time on 'MERCENARY' where after the last Threat Suppressor unit we set up our three sentry turrets on the shipping containers shooting over this massive expanse where the aliens' only spawn point was; plus me on top with a smartgun I just kept buying, shooting targets out to 200 meters, that was so fun), but the AI was still garbage, sometimes we'd see aliens jump-lunge at a teammate and then hover frozen in the air before them as if waiting to get into the "pounce-on-you" animation. So bad. So bad. If someone closed a door another player couldn't open it. If someone welded a door sometimes you couldn't unweld it. Sometimes an open welded door still served as a sealed barrier, but one you could look through. 20% of my games Weyland or the Aliens wouldn't draw - I kid you not - so you couldn't see them when they were shooting/attacking you and you had to just spam grenades at them and hope your sentry turrets would kill them or your team could kill them without you. So bad.
I wanted to play PvP to see if it got any better against human aliens that could think and run or crawl from locations you don't expect, but so few people play this deservedly dead game anymore (on that note, remember how creepy it was watching the aliens CRAWL through the ceiling space? We needed to see them move like that). Having played the bughunt I imagine the PvP was quite awful and could have been incredible (imagine platoons of colonial marines, or even companies, be they actual players or a 'bank' of reserves like in other games such as SQUAD vs a 'bank' of a couple hundred aliens, and the marines are trying to complete all manner of objectives to 'win' by some means or even just get off the planet, and the aliens objectives are "kill the marines" or "capture them for the hive" for bonus points.
One of the worst games I've played in the last 5 years.
Only reason I played through it was because it was ALIENS: COLONIAL MARINES.
This game deserves a ZERO... maybe a 1... but it gets a BONUS POINT for being ALIENS: Colonial Marines no matter how bad it was at that...
... so I guess it gets 1/5 stars *
If you want to experience the latest "Colonial Marines" action, this is your only option: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B005THAX60/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_AAInFb3C53C8R
Surely at some point in the future there will be another one. You can't throw this away, especially now that Disney owns it and loves MONEY. Hopefully they want QUALITY for the fans as well (and Kathleen Kennedy doesn't destroy it with a rampant radical feminist agenda - look, it must have been awful sitting idly as a producer for so many of Steven Spielberg's movies while he molested kids, but hating men and being a feminazi out to destroy masculinity and our favorite characters, both men and women, and their stories, is not going to help you sleep at night; only telling the TRUTH to the press and the courts will).
In the meantime I'm going to go play Aliens vs Predator (2010)... so far it's alright, but not great either. SAD.
Here's my playlist of the campaign and the three Bug Hunt missions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSZQX_rK8pMhAxTQjqNYMhgk6Rb6AHliU
Thanks all for stopping by. Feel free to follow me on Twitch.tv to see more geeky goodness!
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And I also hope your conscience towards God has been stirred. You can ask Him questions at a website I'm still constructing - www.HeHasAnswers.com - and even read what I've written thus far regarding the irrefutable evidence of His existence (or LISTEN to a rough recording of that at my ministry YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCofXyXv8UBESJs08cg5OICA)
God bless you and good night!
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